An illuminating debut following three women in sub-Saharan Africa as they search for home and family

Leona, an isolated American anthropologist, gives birth to a baby girl in a remote Maasai village and must decide how she can be a mother, in spite of her own grim childhood. Jane, a lonely expat wife, follows her husband to the tropics and learns just how fragile life is. Simi, a barren Maasai woman, must confront her infertility in a society in which females are valued by their reproductive roles. In this affecting debut novel, these three very different women grapple with motherhood, recalibrate their identities and confront unforeseen tragedies and triumphs.

In beautiful, evocative prose, Adrienne Benson brings to life the striking Kenyan terrain as these women’s lives intertwine in unexpected ways. As they face their own challenges and heartbreaks, they find strength traversing the arid landscapes of tenuous human connection. With gripping poignancy, The Brightest Sun explores the heartbreak of loss, the struggle to find a sense of belonging and the surprising ways we find our family and home.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ADRIENNE BENSON’s earliest memories include roasting green mangoes over bonfires in Lusaka, Zambia; climbing walls to steal guavas from the neighbors; and riding in the back of a VW van for weeks on end, watching her mom and dad navigate African border crossings and setting up campsites among thieving monkeys and vocal lions. A USAID worker’s daughter, she grew up traversing sub-Saharan Africa, finding homes in Zambia, Liberia, Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire. At sixteen, she made the hardest border crossing of all—the one that brought her “home” to America—a country she barely knew. She’s been a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal, lived in Ukraine and Albania, slept in more airports than she can count and is now happily ensconced in Washington, DC, with her three kids. Her writing has appeared in Buzzfeed; the Foreign Service Journal; Brain, Child; the Washington Post; the Huffington Post; ADDitude magazine; and several anthologies. The Brightest Sun is her first novel.

The Brightest Sun

Adrienne Benson

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

Copyright © Adrienne Benson 2018

Adrienne Benson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9781474083638

My parents, who cracked the world open for me so stories could spill out. My brother, who somehow made them all seem funny. And TCKs everywhere, who grow wild in the spaces between. This is for you.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

PART I

FROM A DIFFERENT TRIBE

A WOMAN LIKE A WILDERNESS

WATER IN A DRY PLACE

NAROK

JUJU

GOD IS THE RAIN, GOD IS THE SKY

CHILDREN BECOME THEMSELVES

SOLAI VALLEY

CHILDREN ARE THE BRIGHT MOON

THE BAOBAB IN SOLAI

PART II

KHAMSA

RIPTIDE

NAKURU

FOREST OF THE LOST CHILD

JACARANDA

BUFFALO

GIRL IN THE SHAPE OF AFRICA

PART III

MOFFAT’S WIFE

A ZEBRA TAKES ITS STRIPES WHEREVER IT GOES

CAPTIVITY

A FATHER, FOUND

Behind the Book: How Nostalgia Brought The Brightest Sun to Life

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

About the Publisher

PART I

FROM A DIFFERENT TRIBE

One of the old women severed the umbilical cord and passed the tiny body, slippery and warm, up into Leona’s arms. It felt unnatural to hold the baby; the infant seemed too small somehow, almost weightless. Leona rolled carefully onto her side and settled the baby next to her. The brand-new hands splayed and stretched blindly in the dim air. Dust motes floated in the crack of light coming through the one palm-sized window cut from the mud walls. Leona watched as the dust swirled. She wished she had a bigger window. She craved light and air. For the first time in the almost twelve months she’d been in Kenya, she yearned for things she’d left home in America. She wanted clean lines and shiny surfaces, nurses in sensible shoes and the comfort of hospital machinery whirring and clicking and dripping around her. For a minute, she even wanted her mother.

The small body wiggled beside her and a sound came out—staccato like the bleating of a newborn goat. It was a tenuous sound, hesitant, an experiment with an uncertain outcome. The tiny lips pursed in anticipation of what only Leona could give. It was a girl, Leona saw. She squeezed her eyes against the coming tears and tried to roll over onto her stomach. She wanted to bury her face in darkness. She was so tired. She felt a sob in her throat and then a sound filled the dark room. It was her scream, she understood, although she couldn’t feel her mouth opening or the reverberation of air. She only heard the sound of keening fill the space around her head and saw Simi and the Maasai attendants jerk their faces up and look at her, then glance at one another, concerned. Simi reached across the baby’s back to take Leona’s hand, but Leona shook her friend off and brought her hands to her face. She tried to press them over her mouth tightly enough to stop the sound. Her insides were glass, shattering in the shell of her skin. This baby was born of loneliness—the desperate kind that arises in people who live among foreigners; who don’t share language or gestures.

* * *

Leona arrived at the manyatta in a little, dented Renault 4 she purchased, with cash, from a departing French expatriate who she’d met her first night in Nairobi. She drove the distance between Nairobi and Loita hesitantly. It was her first time in Africa and the small car didn’t feel like it would offer protection from lions or elephants or any other wild game that might lurk in the yellow savannah grassland she drove through. The drive terrified her so much that she promised herself to stay in the manyatta and only use the car for emergencies. But after a few weeks the dry dust made Leona’s skin itch, and the nearest water source, a little tributary of the Mara River, was low and thick, too muddy to bathe in. Leona didn’t miss much from home, but she did miss the feeling of a shower, the water soaking her hair and skin. She couldn’t stand the way her skin felt, the way her body stank. She wanted a hot shower. She wanted to immerse herself in soap and water, to scrub her hair and fingernails and wash the spaces between her toes. Her yearning to be clean was visceral.

So, only six weeks after her arrival, she packed an overnight bag and drove to Narok to spend the night at the Chabani Guest House. The hotel was small and cheap, mostly used by safari guides and the occasional shoestring tourist or traveling Peace Corps volunteer. But it was clean, and with electricity, running water and a real, if old, mattress, it felt luxurious to Leona. The sky outside was darkening and cool when she arrived. The purple dusks in Kenya were short; night came quickly. Leona turned on all the lights in her room, and laughed at how easily they flicked into brightness. The manyatta had no electricity. After she scrubbed the dirt from her skin and scalp and stood under the warm, rusty water until it ran cold, she dressed in clean clothes, the one set she hadn’t worn yet, saved in the bottom of her suitcase. Until now, she’d only smelled it occasionally. The scent of the American detergent lingered in the fibers and reminded her of home.

She felt new and lighter somehow, cracked free of her dusty shroud. With the smell of floral shampoo still lingering in her hair, Leona went down to the hotel’s café to order a drink.

The bar was wooden-walled and dark. The only light came from a string of colored Christmas tree bulbs—the big ones people back home wrapped around outside tree branches—and a disco ball revolving slowly above a central space where people could dance. There were no dancers that night. Maybe it was still too early.

Leona chose the bar stool farthest away from the only other customers, a white couple, both about her age, maybe a little older. Leona didn’t like small talk so she avoided making eye contact with the two. But she hadn’t seen other white people for weeks, and she found herself unable to keep from glancing up at them. The two were clean; both neatly dressed, which made Leona think they might be tourists. But the woman turned slightly, and Leona recognized the logo of a well-known antipoaching foundation on the front of her T-shirt. The woman was pretty. Petite and blonde with a sunburned spot on her nose and rosy pink cheeks, she watched the man intently as he spoke, his body movements fluid as he gestured with his arms, acting out the story he was telling her. The man was attractive, square shouldered and blond with large, tan hands. Leona forced herself to look away and focused her concentration on gathering the right collection of Swahili words to order a beer. She felt the sudden lightness of joy when the barkeep slid a sweating, brown Tusker bottle her way. She didn’t bother asking for a glass.

The beer—after so long without alcohol—made her feel luminous and unencumbered. The couple laughed loudly and Leona glanced at them again. The blonde woman was standing, holding out a bill, which the man waved away. He turned to the barkeep and said something in rapid-fire Swahili. Then he turned back to the woman and laughed again. Leona heard him say, “Now you’ll have to meet me again, next one’s on you.”

Leona watched him watch the woman walking out of the bar. She wondered if anyone had ever watched her with that intensity.

Halfway through her second beer, she found she didn’t mind when the blond man slid his stool closer to hers and offered to buy her another drink. As they talked, the ease of English after the weeks and weeks of only rudimentary Maa made Leona giddy. Normally a reserved, quiet person, she felt almost drunk with the millions of words she could so easily pluck from her head and toss out, like confetti.

“You’re a flirt,” she said. “Your girlfriend barely left.”

“I am a flirt.” He nodded, smiling. “But you’re wrong. She’s not my girlfriend. I met her here tonight. Interesting girl, though. Working on antipoaching—elephant protection.”

They purposely avoided names. It didn’t come up at first, names hadn’t mattered, and anyway Leona, after weeks of being a curiosity among the Maasai, wanted the anonymity. As an anthropologist, she constantly had to study, observe and ask questions. Now, with this man, she wanted to suspend words and curiosity and talk. Later, alcohol erased the curiosity of names, and the next morning, slow and headachy, Leona felt exposed. She wasn’t new to sex, she’d had a couple of boyfriends during her college and grad school years, but they drifted into, and then out of, her life like ghosts. She’d never, though, slept with someone she’d just met, and under the weight of her headache and nausea, she was ashamed of what she’d done. She wanted to disappear. Sex was a fraught thing. Hard for her to indulge in, an unsettling mix of pleasure and fear.

The man was breathing evenly and heavily next to her, and she had to very carefully slide from under his arm and out of bed. She found her clothes and dressed quickly. But the door creaked when she opened it, and she heard his voice, sleepy and rough. “Going to leave without a goodbye?”

“I have to go back,” she whispered.

“You mean you have to come back to bed,” he said, patting the empty mattress beside him.

Leona turned back to the door and grasped the handle again, pulling it open. When it clicked shut behind her, she raced down the hall to her own room and tossed her shampoo, razor and yesterday’s clothes in her bag. She’d planned to stay in Narok for the day. She wanted to have the hotel do her laundry, and indulge in a big breakfast with coffee. But now she changed her mind. She was embarrassed. She hated feeling out of control, and she was ashamed of herself for letting it happen. She lived by the mantra that it was best to be alone—less difficult, less complicated. She didn’t want to see the man again, or look him in his eyes. She thought she’d see her own shame there, reflected back at her.

Outside the hotel, the morning street was almost empty, but already the air smelled like wood smoke, frying dough and rotting produce. She opened the trunk of her car and tossed her bag in.

“Is it me, or are you running out on your hotel bill?” a voice called, and when Leona turned, he was there. He was dressed and his feet were shoved into unlaced boots. “I have to go up to Solai today. Can’t put it off. But I’ll come to the manyatta as soon as I’m done there. I’ll find you.”

Leona felt the bubbling up of terror deep inside her. It was always this way. Even in college, and graduate school, it wasn’t the sex that made her most frightened, but the aftermath. The first time she’d seen a therapist, it only took thirty minutes of talking through her background before the therapist said, “It sounds like you’re not sexually frigid, but emotionally cut off.” She’d never gone back for another appointment.

“No,” she said, “don’t bother with that.” She inhaled consciously. The panic made her breathing shallow, the imaginary walls that closed in around her made her lungs tense and ineffective. The man was standing close, looking down at her. His eyes were calm, and his face open. She could smell him—warm skin and sleepy breath.

“No, I want to,” he said. “I had fun with you last night. No reason we can’t see one another again, is there?”

There was always this dread when a man wanted to get to know her. She wasn’t normal in this way. Other women her age wanted boyfriends, wanted to marry. The idea set off an alarm in Leona’s mind. It always had. She could share physical intimacy, but the notion of allowing herself to want anything else, to be vulnerable in any other way, tore her in two—yearning and revulsion. She wanted to be normal and allow someone to love her, and to return love, but the fear was always too great, and it always won.

She couldn’t look at the man’s face when she answered. Instead, she glanced sideways, pretending to watch a mangy dog rolling in the dust. “I’m not interested in a relationship,” she said. It was her typical line, worn thin from use. She wondered if it sounded as implausible to him as it did to her.

“Who said anything about a relationship?” the man asked. His lips turning up into a grin that made Leona’s pulse quicken. “I’m just talking about seeing you again. Maybe reprising our night.” He raised his eyebrows suggestively. He was flirting. Leona felt that hollow ache she always felt at moments like this; the ache of wanting something she was far too terrified to actually reach for.

“I have a boyfriend.” That always worked. Even so, Leona didn’t wait to see if his face changed, or if his voice hardened into understanding.

She turned, climbed into her car and slammed the door shut. She might have heard him calling, but she couldn’t be sure. She sped off as fast as she could toward the manyatta. She didn’t look back. She didn’t glance into the rearview and see him standing next to his truck watching her leave. She didn’t want to think about how she’d feel if he never really came looking for her.

* * *

Now, with the baby beside her in her little mud-walled hut, she had no desire to speak. She wept with fatigue and terror as the dark women hunkered at her side, murmuring and running their rough fingers along her arms and across the new baby’s head.

“You must let her nurse,” the Maasai midwife said. She reached over and pulled Leona’s T-shirt up, freed her aching breast and clasped it firmly, rubbing the nipple on the baby’s new mouth.

“Now it’s empty, but the baby will bring the milk.”

Leona wanted to cringe at the unfamiliar fingers on her breast and at the mewling little thing next to her. The baby was blindly flailing, her mouth open hopefully, trying to burrow into Leona’s flesh like a chigger. Leona closed her eyes. She only wanted to sleep. The midwife grasped Leona’s breast again, flattened it in her hand and inserted it firmly into the baby’s mouth. Leona felt a strange sensation and opened her eyes. The baby was connected to her and its desperate little mouth was pulling on Leona’s flesh. A shudder of alarm rippled through her and she bit her lip against the scream she could feel rising in her mouth again. She couldn’t be a mother.

At first when Leona noticed her missing period, she was relieved. The task of finding enough privacy and water to wash herself—let alone driving all the way to Narok to buy supplies—was something she dreaded. When the bleeding didn’t appear, as it should have, Leona was happy. It was all the changes in diet and the syncing with the other women, she assumed. But then it didn’t come again, and again.

When it dawned on her that she was pregnant, it was like she’d been diagnosed with a fatal disease. Her thoughts obsessively circled back to it, again and again. She couldn’t concentrate on work and she couldn’t sleep. Every time she closed her eyes, the tide of dread and distress washed through her. She spent hours flipping through the medical manual she’d brought with her in a desperate search for a remedy. The book offered no way to flush this thing out of her.

By the time she sought out the laiboni, the witch doctor and spiritual leader of the community, she hadn’t slept for nearly a week. The laiboni was a wizened elder who sucked his few remaining teeth when he saw Leona and never seemed to understand her halting Maa. As the village doctor, he had a special role here and knowledge of traditional medicines Leona was dying to include in her work. But he was a stubborn interviewee, and Leona suspected he was wary of her presence in the village. She’d been delicately trying to gain his trust, not asking too much of him yet, instead hoping that the other villagers would assure him of her intentions. Being too direct with the old man might cement his unfavorable opinion. But now Leona was desperate.

“Sopa,” she greeted him, ducking her head as a gesture of respect. He was sitting alone under an acacia tree just outside the village enclosure. He lethargically waved a bead-handled cow tail in front of his face to keep the flies from setting into his eyes. He murmured his own greeting back but said nothing else. Leona lowered herself to the ground in front of him and crossed her legs. She batted a few lazy flies away and tried to decide what to say. Her phrase book lay in her lap, and she flipped through it. Where were the words she needed?

“Hello, my friend.” A voice above Leona pulled her from the book. Simi stood above her, smiling. Simi was the third and youngest wife of the secular village leader’s son. She had been educated in the local school up to sixth grade, and was the only woman in the village who spoke English. Simi wasn’t absolutely fluent, but had enough for most basic conversations and, more important, had the curiosity and dedication to interpret Leona’s explanations and hand gestures. Simi had a sense of the things Leona needed to learn to live in the manyatta, and was never shy about teaching them. She’d been the one, early in Leona’s stay here, to grasp Leona’s hand and guide her outside the village to the shallow riverbed, dry now, and indicate that Leona should come to this spot when she needed to relieve herself. Simi helped Leona buy the few kitchen items she needed—the large pot, or suferia, for boiling water, the frying pan, the tins of sugar and tea—and taught Leona how to keep the embers in her fire pit alive all day. She was the one who Leona talked to like a friend. But Leona couldn’t bear to be honest now. Not about this. Especially not about this.

“Sopa, Simi,” Leona said. She used the Maa word for hello, even though Simi preferred speaking English whenever possible. “I am researching the doctor’s work today. Can you help translate?”

Simi hunkered and spoke quickly to the old man. He nodded and waved his cow tail faster.

“What do you want to know?”

Simi relayed Leona’s question without a blink. Leona was surprised. Maasai looked askance at premarital sex, and Leona knew her situation might cost her the relationships she’d built here.

“It’s for my book,” she assured Simi. And then she asked her to translate the detailed questions she had about the plant, where it was found and how much was used. Was it ingested or topical?

Later, when the old man stood up and shuffled home for tea, Simi turned to look at Leona. Leona tried to tell if Simi’s eyes held anger or sadness and, if so, for whom?

“You should have asked only me. I could tell you this information. Now it is possible that the others in the village will discover your secret.”

“Simi, it’s not for me,” Leona whispered, suddenly on the verge of exhausted tears. “It’s for the book.”

But Simi’s face was serious now, and she leaned close to Leona’s ear and whispered, “You have a baby...inside?”

Leona started as if her friend had slapped her. She looked down at Simi’s slim fingers resting on her arm. She glanced up at Simi’s face and then away again. What should she say? Knowing that Simi might disapprove or, worse, that she’d be reminded of her own pain made Leona frantic with embarrassment and anxiety.

“The man,” Simi whispered, her eyes serious and steady, “did he force you?”

Leona couldn’t stop the tears. Her eyes filled up and she used the heels of both hands to press into her eyes. “I’m sorry, Simi, I’m so sorry.”

Leona considered two things: it was not acceptable for unmarried women to have children out of wedlock and, because of that taboo, her status as a foreigner would be the only thing to prevent the community from banishing her. She thought of the precarious position Simi herself was in—married for three years with no children of her own. Would Simi’s desperation and the irony of the situation make her angry? That was a risk. Leona’s work here was going well, and she couldn’t bear the idea of leaving. She couldn’t bring herself to claim rape, but she could lie.

“My husband,” she said. It was not unusual for Maasai spouses to live apart.

“You never told me you had a husband,” Simi stated. Her voice was quiet, but Leona felt it like a warm current deep below cool water. Simi knew she wasn’t married. Simi knew this baby belonged to nobody, but she wouldn’t betray Leona’s secret.

“Your husband, he must be a strong man.” Simi smiled a small, sad smile. “He is living so far away in America, and still he can give you a baby!”

“Simi, I can’t have a baby.” Leona searched for a reason that Simi would understand, a lie to cover a truth that Simi would never really be able to understand. “My body is broken. It’s dangerous for me to deliver a child.” This was a reason a Maasai woman would see as reasonable. Not the other, not the choice Leona made to sleep with a stranger.

Later, after the village was quiet and dark and most families had settled around their fires in their little huts, Simi slipped through Leona’s door. She held a blue plastic bag filled with leaves.

“I found this for you near the river. Put some inside where the baby is.” And then she slipped outside again.

The leaves were rough and uncomfortable, and Leona worried they would somehow make her sick, poison her for her stupidity. But she slipped a few inside herself several times a day and waited for the relief of blood. It never came. Instead, her breasts began to hurt, she found herself thirsty and her jeans grew tighter and tighter. It was too late.

Leona considered driving to Nairobi to check herself into the hospital for the birth, but it was easier for her to force forgetfulness, and eventually she lost track of the days. There was work to do here. It had been a dry year and the year before had been dry, too. The Maasai in Loita were worried; cattle and goats had begun to get thin. Some of the baby goats had already died, their mothers too emaciated to produce enough milk. Years ago, the Maasai were free to go wherever the good grazing land was. In times of drought, they moved their herds a hundred and seventy miles to Nyeri, in the central highlands, where grass stayed greener and rains were more common. Under British rule, though, the government limited their movements and, with British settlers setting up their own farms, Maasai land was reduced further. The final nail in the coffin of the traditional Maasai way of life was the wildlife preserves. In the 1970s, citing the need for land and wildlife conservation, great swathes of Maasai land were designated as game parks. Grazing was prohibited.

Leona’s work was centered on discovering and mitigating the effects of the government-imposed strictures on the traditionally nomadic Maasai people in Western Kenya. She had the idea that if she could prove that the Maasai culture was changing, and that those changes would negatively impact Kenya in general, it would add fuel to the argument that the government should allow the Maasai more movement, more chances to keep herds healthy and more chances to survive. Her study was vital, life and death, and Leona took it that way—without the option of other grazing land, this culture could disappear as fast and as easily as the rivers and streams were drying.

She had no idea how pregnant she actually was. Thinking about how much time had passed made her panic, so she forced herself not to think about it, let alone plan for it. She hadn’t seen a doctor; she hadn’t had checkups. She spent the months trying to ignore her growing belly and forcing all thoughts of the future out of her head. She felt sick when the movements started—the tugging and sliding of her insides felt like a punishment. She watched Simi watching her grow, and when she let Simi place a hand on her moving belly, she wished fervently that the roles were reversed. After a while, the other women around her noticed, and that was a relief. They offered to help carry water and sent their own children to collect wood for Leona’s fire. And so it settled in—the silence, the forced ignorance. Leona worked constantly: watching the people around her and taking careful notes. The people in the village knew that she was there to observe their culture and way of life so she could write about them, maybe help them with the grazing problem. They knew her research meant she observed them and wrote in the notebook she always had with her, and that she asked questions incessantly about everything she saw. Leona began to draft what she planned to turn into her book, an academic study of the shifting cultural norms of the Loita Maasai brought on by laws limiting their nomadic heritage. She concentrated all her efforts on looking outward, and purposely pushed away what was happening inside.

That’s why her baby was born in the way of Maasai babies—in her dim inkajijik, the small hut made from thin branches covered with mud and dung. Only the embers in the fire pit lighted the birth, and when the baby’s eyes opened, they opened to a halo of wood smoke. The first face the baby saw was brown and wrinkled and adorned with strings of beads sewn onto strips of leather. The first sounds she heard were the women ululating four times to alert the village to the birth of a girl, their calls echoed by the lowing of cows.

Three days after the baby was born, Leona was curled around the infant on her bed. She was still so tired. She must have dropped off because the sound of a car engine and the shouts of people greeting one another outside slipped through her sleep. She lay still, for a moment forgetting everything, and grasped at the feeling of peace. It evaporated the moment she recognized one of the voices outside. When the tall blond man dipped his shoulders and neck to fit through her little door, she wasn’t altogether surprised. If he heard the story of an American giving birth, he’d know who it was. A white woman having a baby in a Maasai village would be big news. There was nobody else it could be. That he came, though, shocked her. She assumed he’d avoid further contact, eschew responsibility. But there he was, and for a moment Leona was stunned into silence.

“How are you?” he said. His English words, though flattened by his British-Kenyan accent, were startling in their familiarity. Leona tried to discern his reaction to the birth from his voice, whether or not he was angry. She concentrated hard, but her vision felt fuzzy and her thoughts flipped too quickly to pin down and consider. He was so handsome, and she remembered how her body stretched toward him that night, like a plant craving light. Even now, a part of her pulled toward him. She thought of how it felt to be pressed into him, how her head had spun with alcohol and need and how she’d wanted him, and how he’d wanted her, too. But the person she was that night in the Chabani Guest House, the woman who’d used flowery shampoo and worn her tightest jeans, the woman who had not walked away when the blond stranger spoke to her...that wasn’t the real Leona. It wasn’t her, she reminded herself as she looked up at the man. Her cheeks reddened and she wished, for the millionth time, that she could erase the previous months and erase that night and erase that rare, stupid version of herself.

The man leaned down and studied the sleeping baby.

“A girl?” he whispered, and reached out as if he wanted to touch the baby with his fingertips to check if she was real, but he stopped before finger met cheek. He glanced at Leona’s face and then away again. She couldn’t read him. He folded his lanky body and knelt on the dirt floor next to where she lay, up on the raised bed of rawhide stretched and dried to stiffness on a frame of sticks.

Watching the man now, here, in her home, Leona realized that although she had no idea what he was called, she knew a lot of other things about him. He’d grown up on a cattle ranch in Solai—close to Maasailand—and had a profound understanding of the Maasai and a fluency in their ways. He knew many of the elders in Leona’s manyatta. This was what had impressed Leona the night they met and caused her to feel that unfamiliar yearning stretch through her. He made her feel comfortable, so she didn’t hesitate when he gently picked her hand up off the bar and told her to follow him to his room. She liked his coarse blond hair and his sunburned, peeling arms that wrapped around her in the night, and his wide, calloused fingers rough on her breasts. While it was dark and they were breathing together that night, she let herself think about how it might be to have a man of her own—one she wanted—to lie with every night. She hadn’t wanted that before, but under the darkness of that night the thought was as exciting as it was terrifying.

In the weeks after she’d met him, though she knew she’d been clear to him, brutally so, perhaps, Leona found herself hoping through the hot, still days. She couldn’t shake the suspicion that something was different. In the golden evenings when the sun pulled colors out of the sky and turned the landscape soft and blue, she scanned the horizon around the manyatta for the telltale clouds of dust a Land Rover would make if it were hurtling up the track toward her.

She hated herself a little more each day when it grew dark without him coming. And she hated him for causing her to hope that he’d ignore the way she’d brushed him off in Narok and come find her, anyway. The multiplying cells inside of her—his baby—had nothing to do with her confusing feelings about the man himself. This was her usual pain: wanting to be seen and loved but being utterly unable to let herself allow it. She accepted being alone, she liked it, but there was the occasional wondering. How would it be to share a life with a man? Maybe with this man? How would it feel to see him and to allow herself to be seen? Each evening when he didn’t appear, she nursed her disappointment by listing the reasons it was better to be alone. She knew them by heart—and she knew that however many items she listed, there was really only one reason: her own fear. This made her hate herself, too.

The dust gathered in her hair and made her itch, but she didn’t go back to Narok to shower. She lived with it, like the Maasai did. She was adjusting, she convinced herself, to the life of an embedded anthropologist. When she really understood she was pregnant, and it was long after she could do anything about it, she felt too paralyzed to make the effort to find out who the man was, exactly, and to let him know. She couldn’t imagine the conversation they’d have to have, or the decisions they’d have to make. It was too much. She told herself over and over again that she didn’t want a relationship, she preferred being in a place where everyone was different from her, where she could restrict her interactions and be just an observer. The man—the baby’s father—wouldn’t allow her to limit herself. He would require more than she felt she knew how to give. More than she wanted to give. Intimacy was a risky thing.

Now, here he was.

A Maasai woman, squatting in the shadows by the low embers of the fire pit, reached out and handed him a chipped enamel cup of chai. He took it and thanked her in Maa. He looked perfectly relaxed, happy even, to be there. Leona was grateful Simi had gone to the river; surely she would have noticed Leona’s discomfort. Surely she would have fit the pieces of the puzzle together. And what then? Leona felt a sudden anger burn in her chest—here was another man who walked in without permission, who settled in her space with no regard to whether she wanted him there or not.

“Were you going to tell me?” the baby’s father asked now.

Leona shut her eyes tightly. She answered in Maa.

“Go away. It’s not your child.”

“That’s bullshit, and we both know it.” He paused, then spoke so quietly Leona could barely hear him. “I didn’t have a good father myself, but I think I’d like to try to be one.” His voice cracked slightly. “Whether or not you want me in your life, the girl deserves a father in hers.”

“You had a shitty father? Well, so did I,” she said. “What makes you think you’d do a better job?”

She saw the man wince. His expression hardened. She knew she’d hit a nerve—she’d hurt him. She wasn’t happy about that, but she sensed a shift in his attitude and felt relief. If she had to hurt him in order to get him to leave her alone, so be it.

To her surprise, he spoke again. “Give me a chance to be a better father than mine, or yours, apparently.”

She felt hemmed in, strangled. Why wouldn’t he just go? Like a trapped animal, she bit hard. “A father is the last thing this baby needs. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to know, because I don’t want her to suffer through a terrible childhood like I did. You’re not going to change my mind.”

* * *

Leona grew up watching the rain fall on the green, green grass in the yard of her parents’ home in Beaverton, Oregon. Her father was a surgeon—never around during the day—and her mother was only a shadowy presence, less a mother than a waft of perfume in another room, always on the way out, always saying goodbye. Leona was left home with a housekeeper who lazily vacuumed the Persian rugs and huddled on the back deck in her blue uniform smoking secret cigarettes and blowing rings into the wet sky. Leona had no siblings, and was never encouraged to bring friends home or to go to parties, so she was ignored at school. Not bullied, not sought after, but invisible.

If she were ever asked to sum up her childhood in one word, she would have said silent. Silence was forced on her. Her father’s infrequent presence was a dark thing, covered by night and a sleeping house. The crack of her bedroom door opening and the memory of rough skin pressed against Leona’s cheek, the dank smell of his breath and his wet lips hissing in her ear, “Don’t tell your mother. Don’t say anything to anyone. You’ll ruin it...you’ll ruin me.” Those nights Leona bit her soft inner cheeks bloody and raw to keep from making a sound.

Only once did she try to break the silence with her mother. Her father always left the house early, and at breakfast one day Leona unlocked her voice. Her mother smiled at her over her toast, and Leona whispered a phrase she’d chosen carefully, the canary in the mine. “Dad came into my room last night.” The coffee bubbled loudly in the percolator, and Leona found that forever after, the sound made her anxious.

Her mother’s pause lasted a lifetime. Leona dragged her fork through the egg yolks on her plate, afraid to look up.

“Your father is under a lot of pressure at work,” her mother finally answered, and when Leona glanced up to explain what she meant, to spill it all out like a liquid from a broken bottle, she caught her mother’s eye. There was a tiny flicker there, a lit candle, and then the curtain snapped tightly shut over it. A shutter firmly closed against a possible storm.

After that, Leona kept the secret locked away from everything else. In the daytime she sat through classes at school, concentrating hard, always finding the correct answer. In the evenings, she sat at the kitchen table doing homework while the maid ironed. Her mother came and went, came and went, off to Ladies Auxiliary meetings or the Junior League. Leona’s insides turned to stone, but she never wondered if her mother noticed that her father couldn’t look Leona in the eyes.

The invisibility—the pressure not to speak—became a habit. It saw her through high school and college and, later, through her doctoral program in sociocultural anthropology. Leona grew a jagged space—a broken section deep inside. She learned that people, especially the ones closest to her, weren’t to be trusted.

She declared a major in anthropology because she felt she’d never learned to understand humans; her childhood had given her no great notion of how her own species worked. She was desperate to go as far away from her parents as she could. Leona wrote with skill and conviction and her Fulbright application was chosen. Three months later she was ensconced in a bathroom-sized mud-and-cow-dung inkajijik, in a manyatta filled with identical inkajijiks. They all circled the central livestock corral and were protected from lions and elephants by thorny acacia branches piled in a ring around the whole cluster. In the rare letters to her parents, Leona referred to her new home as a “gated community.”

Dusty and crowded, the manyatta was noisy with the grunting of livestock that lived inside the circle of thorny branches, and the sounds of hyenas, wildebeests and the occasional lion from outside. The small door to her hut was open—as they all were—and she loved the voices she could hear almost always, even brighter in the night, from the tiny huts all around her. She loved the constant scent of other humans and the way the livestock made the air smell tangy. It surprised her at first that she even loved the lack of physical space in the Maasai culture and how a child climbed into her lap every time she sat down and how the other women included her without question in their daily lives. For the first time she felt seen. Eventually she realized her comfort came from the fact that she was foreign. The language barrier and the cultural differences gave her the perfect excuse to feign misunderstanding, to keep people at a manageable distance—not physically, perhaps, but emotionally. At home she couldn’t hide this way. Her unwillingness to be vulnerable was an obvious thing, a scarlet letter people read as standoffish, odd. Here, her days were filled with sound and the presence of people, and she felt warm in it, relaxed, fully in charge of the depth and frequency of any emotional exchange.

But through everything—the meals she shared with the villagers, the long walks to the spring to collect water in her bucket, the rare rainstorms that saw her side by side with the other women in the village slapping fresh mud and soggy cow dung on the leaky inkajijik roof while rain poured down her back—she remembered the first rule of the anthropologist, Participate Only to Observe, and she held back the one thing she could: herself.

Here in Loita, people expressed curiosity about Leona. Women and children crowded into her little inkajijik to watch her. These women wanted to know about her father and her mother and her old life. It wasn’t lost on Leona that her first experience of bonding with other women was in a language she didn’t speak fluently and in a place half a world away from where she’d come.

She liked the questions the women asked, she liked the way they wanted to know her; it was novel and pleasant. Mostly, she loved that she could pick and choose her answers, and that they could never know what she held back—they couldn’t force intimacy against her will. When she spoke to them about herself, she chose her words like picking fruit from a tree, selecting wisely—concentrating on telling them things that didn’t hurt. She painted a picture of her life up to now that was simple and easy, a life that didn’t make her sad. Mother, Father, school and work. She deflected the conversation when she had to. It was easy to edge away from dangerous memories by changing the subject to the differences between a Maasai home and an American one, or how American people dressed and what they ate. Only Simi pressed. Her curiosity was relentless, and she asked endless questions about life outside the village. Her brief education had given her a rare glimpse into the world, and she drank Leona’s stories like water. Simi was different from the other women. She didn’t loiter by the river gossiping, or tease the other women to make them laugh. She had several books, children’s primers, really, that she’d kept from her days at school. Once she showed them to Leona. She proudly lifted them from a small basket tucked under her bed. She could read, she told Leona proudly—none of the other women in the village could.

After that, Leona selected a couple of novels she’d brought with her—beloved classics. The Call of the Wild was Simi’s favorite. Simi poured over the book. She’d sit under an acacia reading for hours, oblivious to the annoyance of the other women who called her lazy and proud. Her innate intelligence broke down the urge to judge things. She’d ask Leona to explain the words she didn’t understand, like snow. She said she liked the way the dog was in charge, the loyalty he showed. She said she’d never thought that even Americans could be cruel to each other—in Kenya, America was seen as a perfect place where only good things happened.

It suited Leona to be emotionally removed from the commotion around her and to have the freedom to be on the outside looking in. Here, nobody expected any more than that from her. Back home, when another person did something Leona didn’t comprehend, something that hurt or confused her, she felt a terrible sense of bewilderment, of sinking beneath the surface into a place where she couldn’t breathe—the fear of not understanding what she felt she should have understood. Here, that panicked sense was gone. She didn’t want to cross that line, to feel confused and misunderstood without a reason again.

Leona knew that in Maasailand, babies weren’t recognized until they were three months old. Children are loved, but utilized, and the utility is treacherous. She’d seen babies die of disease before they took their first steps; she’d observed death rites for teenagers bitten by snakes, toddlers who fell into cooking fires and the bleeding body of a seven-year-old fatally mauled by a hyena while tending goats outside the village. It was prudent, Leona thought, to hold your children at arm’s length when you lived the hard life of the Maasai. Anything could happen, after all. Life out here was fragile; you had to be tough. This is what she told herself when her baby was born. These were the thoughts in her head. She convinced herself it was good to keep distance between herself and the baby. She wrapped her leaky breasts tightly with a kanga and let another nursing mother in the village feed the baby. She let Simi take the baby to her house to sleep, and she let Simi carry the baby on her back during the walks to the river. This was the line that she drew between herself and her child.

Simi loved the baby. With no children of her own, she was free to adopt a baby who couldn’t, for whatever reason, be cared for by its own mother. Leona knew that Simi was more of a mother to her child than she was. She also knew Simi’s place in the village, as a childless wife, was precarious. She said yes when Simi asked to make it official; she consented to an adoption ceremony—the laiboni slaughtered a ram and both women ate the fat. That was the traditional process. Leona knew, in her own head, that her daughter would never really be Maasai, that she was, by her inherited DNA, privy to the perks of being American, but she felt better in an unexpected way. Her child had two parents now.

The Maasai elders gave the baby her first, sacred, name. The name only used by the parents, nobody else. Nalangu, they whispered to Leona, which meant “from a different tribe.” And that’s what the little pale baby looked like. A different tribe, an alien being that Leona observed; who she watched learn to roll over on a rawhide blanket, who she watched nursing from another woman’s breast, who took her first steps in the red dust and dried dung of the manyatta. Leona watched the baby grow in the same way she watched all the babies of the village grow. She allowed her baby to go to Simi for comfort, and not come to her. She spoke to the baby in English, but she spoke to all the kids in English—their parents wanted them to learn. She convinced herself that nothing was different, that the nine months of her pregnancy never really happened and the terror she had felt through it all was just a bad dream.

At night, though, Leona often woke up sweating and terrified, her nightmares alive in her mind. She dreamed of her baby disappearing into a puff of smoke, or being carried away in the mouth of a lion, the wide tawny shoulders heaving as it leaped over the thorny fence, the shaggy blond mane curling slightly over the cold, yellow, animal eyes. Those nights she’d sit bolt upright and reach over to check for her baby’s presence. The baby was never there. When she was awake, Leona hated the version of herself she saw in the nightmares; it wasn’t the smoke or the lion that caused the frantic heart beating and the suffocating breath, but instead it was the vision of herself, just standing there watching, calmly stirring the chai in her dented enamel cup with her metal spoon, in concentric circles, over and over again, while her child vanished before her eyes. What kind of mother did nothing but watch?

Leona found peace and freedom in concentrating on her work. It was important, not just to her, but to the community. When a Maasai member of parliament gave a speech in Narok, Leona pulled him aside afterward and told him of her work, of her idea to convince the government to allow grazing privileges, at least during droughts. He’d been trying to forward a similar idea and asked Leona to send him her research. This forced Leona to focus more fully on her observations of specifics; current grazing patterns versus the ones the elders had known, old ways of dealing with drought versus the new ones. Leona began to visit other manyattas in the area, gathering observations and stories from the largest sampling she could. Those trips away from her baby didn’t upset either one of them. Nalangu was perfectly content with Simi and her wet nurse; Leona was perfectly content not being a mother.

When Nalangu was one, it came time for her to be given a real name—one that could be said aloud, a name that she would keep. Leona allowed Simi to choose that name, and when the girl’s hair was washed with milk and water, and then shaved, Leona watched, notebook and pen in hand. The new name Simi selected was Adia, gift. Like all the kids in the manyatta, she was the child of everyone—free to eat and sleep with any of the mothers, and so Leona’s connection to Adia remained the same as her connection to all the babies around her; affectionate but removed, seen through a telescope, detailed but remote.

Since Maasai fathers played only a tiny role in the lives of their children, Adia’s lack of one was barely a detail worth considering. By the time Adia turned three, Leona didn’t think much about the girl’s father. She’d succeeded in keeping him away. Leona was relieved, frankly, to let it go.

It was easy for Leona to concentrate on her work with all the mothers available to her daughter. And, because of that, it was easy for the days to slip into months, and even years. Occasionally, Leona drove to Nairobi to meet with her government contact. She provided him with the information she’d gathered, and he began taking it to the halls of parliament. Leona liked her trips to Nairobi. She was beginning to crave a city again, the intellectual stimulation of others like her. And she was finally making a name for herself. Other local anthropologists sought her out; she was becoming known in her field. And she rarely thought of Adia. She knew her daughter was safe in the manyatta under the watchful eyes of Simi and the other women.

During one trip to Nairobi, she was introduced to the head of the anthropology department at the University of Nairobi. He’d requested a meeting, and after they talked awhile, he offered her a position on his staff. Leona was thrilled. Now that she had evidence to support her theory that imposed grazing borders were disproportionately damaging to Maasai communities, she could take that to the lecture halls. She could talk to students about the way their own society was changing, and maybe help inspire a new generation of people committed to the work of helping nomadic people.

Leona thought of her daughter and considered her choices. She could mother the girl alone in Nairobi without the benefit of the village women. She thought back to the nightmares she’d had early on and how casually her nightmare self watched as the baby vanished. What an unsuitable mother she was. It occurred to her that she could leave Adia in the manyatta and come to Nairobi by herself. The manyatta was Adia’s home, after all, and she had Simi.

Leona harbored a smoky vision of Adia as a teenager, bent over books in a real high school. That vision, she understood, would require her involvement as a mother. But that was a distant problem. Adia was too young for school, and she’d be safe and happy in the manyatta, at least for a while. She was barely three—far too young for Leona to have to worry about educating her.

The thought niggled at her mind and made her heart beat fast in her chest. She told the department head she needed time to think, to tie up a few loose ends in her research, but she knew her decision was made. The whole drive back to Loita she imagined the way it would feel to teach, to make more contacts in the higher realms of Kenyan government. She could feel excitement in her blood. She could do this; she could use her work, her skills, to help the people she’d come to love so much she’d practically given them her firstborn child.

She stopped for gas a few hours’ drive from the manyatta, and, on a whim, decided not to wait. Leona liked to be resolute after making a decision. While the attendant washed the windshield, Leona asked to use the phone. The connection was fuzzy and unclear, but the department head understood. She accepted the position. She’d move to Nairobi soon. The new semester was only a few weeks away, and as she drove the final miles to the place she’d called home for over four years, Leona listed the things she’d need in her new life: a place to live in the city, clothes to wear for teaching (her old, torn jeans and cotton blouses wouldn’t do); a bank account; an office with a decent computer. These thoughts distracted her as she rolled to a stop outside the manyatta enclosure. She registered the presence of more people than usual milling around but didn’t think about why they might be there. Her mind was full of other thoughts. In her inkajijik, Leona looked around. She’d probably leave most everything here. Simi could use it, and Adia. Absently, Leona reached for a small pile of mail someone—Simi probably—left on her bed. The mail came from Nairobi via Narok, and then to a shop that doubled as a post office nearer the manyatta. Usually, when she received mail, the shopkeeper would send his son to deliver it to her directly. This mail must have come while she was away.

When Leona wrote to her parents, she selected her words carefully. She didn’t keep Adia a secret, but she didn’t write much about her, either. In the letters, she explained only that the father was not present and that the baby—a girl—was happy and safe. As Adia grew, the letters Leona received from her parents became insistent. They’d started a bank account for the girl; they’d rewritten their will. Her father, in particular, couldn’t imagine life in the manyatta. He couldn’t stomach the idea of his only grandchild—a little girl, for that matter—growing up in the dirt, as he said, without the civility of nearby doctors and things like electricity and running water. Leona forced herself to open all of the letters and to read them. But each time a fat, white envelope—half covered with stamps—appeared in the manyatta, she felt her breath quicken and saw sparks of light behind her eyes. She felt she was sinking. She wondered why she’d bothered to tell them about Adia in the first place.

When she read the letters they wrote to her, the pain of her childhood came back like the feeling of a phantom limb, or the flashes of her remembered nightmares. But something surprised Leona, too. Underneath the anger she had for her parents, and the resentment, she fought an unexpected jealousy. The idea of her parents showing concern for Adia when they had never shown much for her was a notion that cut her. She planned to never let them meet her child. She planned to never go back to the wet silence of those Oregon skies or to the dead feeling of being alone in a house with only the ticking of clocks and the hum of the refrigerator to remind her she was alive.

“And who is the father?” this most recent letter asked. “You must know. If nothing else, a girl deserves a father.” It was this that forced a crack in Leona’s long-held conviction about keeping a distance from the white Kenyan. The cruel joke that her own father—simultaneously brutal and absent—should imply that his granddaughter needed something he’d never given Leona sent a shiver up into a hidden spot in her brain. She pushed the thought away and tried to bury it. She told herself that Simi and the village were all Adia needed, at least for now. And yet the thought grew in her mind.

Her father, her parents, made Leona what she was—silent and isolated. During the torturous moments when the worry couldn’t be pushed away, Leona wondered if she was giving her own daughter the same relationship her parents had given her—disconnected and cool. She hated the idea of that, and the guilt it filled her with, but she didn’t know how to be different. Knowing she’d fail was why she’d never wanted to be anyone’s mother in the first place. She was torn. When she watched Adia with the Maasai children, laughing and playing games, never alone and never silent, she was happy. Adia always had Simi. Leona told herself that Adia’s childhood was better than her own. Adia would grow up with age-mates and friends, and the constant activity and watchful eyes of the entire village. It helped Leona to realize that, if her daughter grew up here, she would be nothing like she herself was. Leona tried to convince herself that giving her child a community, a feeling of belonging somewhere, was far more important than giving Adia herself as a mother.

This most recent letter, the one Leona read now after accepting the position at the university, was no different from the others. Leona crumpled it into the tiniest ball she could, tossed it in the fire pit, and went to find Simi.

As she stepped through her doorway and into the light, she noticed again the number of people in the manyatta. There was the laiboni, the spiritual leader, surrounded by the young moran, warriors, in the central area between the small houses. Newly initiated warriors crowded the manyatta. Their faces and their long braids were slicked with a mixture of bright red dirt and sheep fat. It made Leona feel light-headed when she realized that in the faces of these brand-new men—most only thirteen or fourteen—she recognized the rounded faces of little boys she’d first met four years ago. Now they were men. She’d been here for so long. She hadn’t considered how it would hurt to leave them all behind. To leave Simi. The thought made her feel dizzy, and she wandered over to sit with the elders in the shade of a scraggly acacia tree.

“What’s happening?” she asked one wizened woman.

“Emurata,” the woman answered.

When Leona first came to the manyatta, she forced herself to watch everything, all the rituals and ceremonies. Her work was to observe, without emotion, the daily life and events that reflected the beliefs of the people she wrote about. Her least favorite ritual was the girls’ coming-of-age rite, the emurata. She found it impossible not to wince at the cutting of the flesh, and she found herself unable to keep from feeling a harsh judgment against the entire idea. Her resolve to observe everything without critique was tested every time she was audience to an emurata. After watching three of them, she convinced herself she had all the information she needed about the practice and stopped going to the ceremonies at all.

The ceremony had started and the moran began to dance. They stood in a circle, impossibly tall and impossibly thin, backs as straight as the spears they held. When they began their singing, they chanted uh-uh-uh-uuuu-huh and the straight-bodied jumping made their braids slap against their backs and the iron of their spear tips glisten in the sun—Leona knew the circumcision was about to start. She stood up and walked past the dancing moran. She wanted to be outside the village, far enough away so that the wind in the acacia trees would fill her ears instead of the sound of the rites.

Vaguely, as she made her way through the crowd, she glanced around for Adia. It was rare that she was alone with the girl, but she wanted that now. It occurred to her she would miss the daily interaction—as unsubstantial as it was—with her daughter. A tingle of worry nibbled at her from somewhere deep and hidden. Her parents’ letter, the guilt it made her feel, pressed into her mind. She wanted to hurry, but she was caught between the desire to leave and the unfamiliar feeling of maternal responsibility leaking through her. Where was Adia?

Leona could tell the instant the knife met flesh by the sound of the deep-throated cry of the girl that rose from the squat dung-and-wattle structure and hovered in the air. An image flashed into Leona’s mind of Adia, sprawled and bleeding. It couldn’t be her, Leona knew. At three, Adia was far too young, but the image of her daughter being cut, now or years from now, set Leona’s heart pounding. Someday Adia would be thirteen. Someday, if Leona did leave her here, Adia would think of the cutting as normal, as necessary. This would be her world. Maybe her father was right. The idea of giving him credit for parenting advice made Leona sick, but she couldn’t ignore it. This was her daughter, after all. And then some tiny, unwelcome shoot of a poison plant took root in her mind—a thought she didn’t want to think. As much as she hated them, there was a part of Leona that desperately wanted her parents’ approval. They were happy to have a grandchild. It was the first thing Leona had done to inspire their pride.

Leona’s head throbbed, and she felt a trickle of sweat beading down her back. Her heart was beating too fast now, she wanted to sit down, to be able to breathe slowly and pull her thoughts back to where she could contain them, control them.

Then the girl screamed again. Of course she screamed. Of course she writhed against the knife. And Leona, alert and wild with panic, bounded across the dusty paddock.

The quick absence of light when she bent into the ceremonial inkajijik made her stop and rub her eyes, but when she opened them, through the haze of smoke, she saw her small blonde daughter sitting ramrod straight in a gaggle of little girl age-mates, watching intently as the bleeding almost-woman curled in pain under the glinting blade. Leona’s eyes watered, the wood smoke thick in the air. Through the tears, she thought she could see blood in the dust, little bands of soft flesh left behind.

In one fluid movement, Leona leaned over the embers in the fire pit and pulled her daughter up and out into the light, hissing through the smoke that choked in her throat as she dragged Adia, “You can’t watch this. This is not for you... Not for you. Not for us.”

Through her panic, Leona didn’t see Simi approach, concerned, and when Adia turned away from Leona to pull herself toward the other woman, who grasped the girl’s other arm, Leona responded by pulling harder. Flickers of her life as a child popped in her mind. It wasn’t all bad. There was the summer camp she loved, the elderly neighbor lady who bought all her Girl Scout cookies one year after Leona admitted to being too shy to go door-to-door, the ice-cream truck in the summer, the smell of the Christmas tree in December and the Thanksgiving dinners they shared with friends who always brought Leona little presents. Was she stealing that life from Adia?

“You are not Maasai,” Leona hissed. She saw Simi then, and their gazes held, both women clutching the girl who stood, sobbing, in the dust between them.

“I adopted her,” Simi said.

Leona remembered the ram, and the fat she had eaten and the relief it brought her to know she wasn’t solely responsible for the baby. Simi had helped her. Surely, though, she hadn’t meant forever? Surely Simi knew that Leona didn’t really have to obey the traditions of a culture that wasn’t her own?

“You are her second mother,” Leona said, watching Simi’s face carefully—there was nothing but alarm in her eyes. Adia twisted, trying to release herself, but instead stumbled.

“I am her first,” Leona continued. “She has a family in America.” She thought of the letter, of her parents’ concern that Adia be educated, be allowed to live like an American. Leona wished there wasn’t a minuscule part of her that didn’t agree with them. She hated that, on some level, she knew they were right.

Adia jerked backward and fell. Leona kept her grip, but Simi, in an instinctual moment, leaned forward to break Adia’s fall. In that second, Leona pulled Adia out of Simi’s reach.

“Simi, she can’t be a Maasai. I can’t let that cutting happen to her.”

Then her own daughter’s voice, thick and raw, hysterical, rose above the manyatta like the call of an exotic bird, out of place, far from home. Whether she was screaming from the pain of Leona’s tight grip around her upper arm, from the humiliation of being dragged out of the ceremony or from fear of the sudden and uncontrolled presence of a mother she hardly knew, Leona didn’t know. She didn’t care. Leona pulled Adia up and held her up against her hip. She knew that she had to get Adia away from here quickly, while the conviction was strong. She stumbled as fast as she could to where her car was parked.

“This is not your real life, Adia,” Leona said over and over again. “You are not Maasai. You are like me. You are like me.”

Leona’s car was dented and rusted to the point of being colorless. Now, she pulled the back door open, grateful it was unlocked—her shaking hands could never have managed a key—pushed Adia into the back seat and clicked the child’s seat belt firmly. She didn’t say goodbye to the people she’d lived with for so long, she didn’t let Adia say goodbye. She was frantic to leave, driven by the thought that if she didn’t go now, her own fear would force her to change her mind again and leave Adia behind. Simi was screaming frantically on her knees in the dust, other women gathering by her, and one began running toward the car. Leona slammed the driver’s-side door shut so violently that the window slid down into the door frame, off its track, rendering it useless. She managed to fit the key into the ignition and start the car. She popped the brake and hit the gas pedal. Adia screamed and screamed, crying out for Simi as the car bumped wildly on the lumpy, dusty road. She banged on the window with her small fist and kicked the back of Leona’s seat.

Leona felt like a kidnapper.

It was getting dark when the lights of Narok emerged on the horizon. Leona hated driving at night. There were too many hazards—broken-down trucks in the road you couldn’t see until it was too late to avoid them, elephants wandering, antelope shocked into stillness right in front of you by the flash of your headlights. Leona knew of too many car accidents to take it lightly, and when she reached the cluster of buildings that made up the Narok town, she shuddered the Renault to a stop in front of the Chabani Guest House. She hadn’t been here since the night of Adia’s conception. She felt a flutter of nerves. What if he was here? What would she say? But the lobby was empty, and when the attendant showed Leona to the nicest room—one of only three with an en suite bath and more than one light to read by—the hall was empty, too.

That night, Leona avoided the bar. Instead, she walked a teary-eyed Adia to a café down the street. Adia, over and over again, asked for Simi, for her mother.

“I want to stay with my mother,” she said once. “Not with you.”

Leona lied and told the girl they’d go back home soon. She ordered Adia french fries, grilled meat and ice cream. The novelty of the ice cream worked. This is a vacation, she told her daughter. Back in the hotel, Adia consented to a shower and laughed at the feeling of water pouring over her head and down her back. When she climbed into bed, wet hair slicked against her neck, looking as small and pale as a grub, she asked Leona what the sheets were for? The pillow?

Her own daughter had never slept on a mattress. The thought shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it shocked her. Leona flicked off the light and lay in the dark. She remembered her own childhood home, her father distant and silent, with hard, hard hands. She remembered what it felt like when she was a child and a stranger in her own life. She thought of the man who gave her Adia, a gift that terrified her into numbness for so long. The girl lay in the bed beside her, so close Leona could feel the rise and fall of her breathing, the tiny lungs; the warm air she expelled.

When Leona finally fell asleep, she fell asleep with Adia’s soft hair under her chin and her arm wrapped around Adia’s shoulders. There wasn’t a nightmare that night. Leona’s sleep was calm. She dreamed about the sky, clear and calm and infinite. It was the kind of sky she remembered from one long ago summer when she was a child, and the darkness hadn’t bloomed inside her, and the endless rain hadn’t come.

When Leona woke up it was barely light. A centipede trailed along the polished floor and Leona watched it disappear and reappear through the shadows. She absently smoothed back Adia’s hair with her palm. They were in Narok now. The white Kenyan came here, Leona knew. He lived nearby. If they waited long enough, asked the right people the right questions, they could find him. Leona was sure of that. She felt a twinge inside of her somewhere, a place so deep she’d almost forgotten, silent and still but, finally, shivering with potential. The sky was getting lighter outside the window and there were squares of light on the wall opposite the bed. Leona twisted her back so she was facing her baby. She traced her finger along the small nose that looked like hers, the ears that reminded Leona of her own mother’s. Then she recognized the feeling that was so tiny and so deep down between her bones. Hope was a seed inside of her.

A WOMAN LIKE A WILDERNESS

Simi’s earliest memory was one she wished she could forget. Mostly she pushed it to the back of her mind and kept it trapped there in the dark. Sometimes, though, mostly while she slept, it slipped out of its confines and floated, ghostly, into her consciousness.

The details were no longer clear. In her memory, the inkajijik was chilly. That didn’t make sense, Simi knew, because her mother was a good Maasai woman who always kept burning embers in her fire pit. She would never allow the fire to burn out or let the air chill. There would have been fire. But still, in Simi’s adult mind, the memory was cold. It was a typical evening, happy and calm. She and her mother and brother sat by the fire. Simi and her brother were telling their mother about their day at school. Their mother loved hearing about school and was proud that she was sending both her children, not just her son.

Simi’s family was rich in cattle and children. Her mother was her father’s fourth wife. This was a lucky thing for Simi because by the time she was born he’d grown accustomed to the demands children placed on his time and his money. Mostly her father kept away from the children, and he only visited Simi’s mother’s house when he needed something. He spent his time with other elders under the shade of an acacia tree. One of his wives made honey beer, and he enjoyed that and spent most nights in her hut. Sometimes he liked the honey beer so much his speech slurred and his walking became erratic. Before the night when everything changed, Simi thought her father was funny when he was drunk. Afterward, it made her hate him.

Simi’s mother was quiet and thoughtful; she didn’t spend much time with the other women. Instead, in her free time she sat alone and made intricate beaded jewelry. Her designs were delicate and unique. They were so beautiful that people from other manyattas, some two or three days’ walk away, began to seek out her creations. Sometimes they would trade a goat for a piece, sometimes they would pull a faded wad of shillings from their wraps. Simi’s mother allowed the animals to wander with the others. She made no secret of them. The money, though, she hid. She saved it in an old tobacco tin she kept hidden in the dark space under the bed. When Simi turned seven, her mother bought a used school uniform and sent Simi to school. Simi’s father didn’t notice, or didn’t care, that Simi left the manyatta each morning, dressed in a uniform she carefully kept pristine by washing it each week in the river and hanging it to dry over a small, thornless bush.

As the years passed, her mother earned enough money to buy Simi a new uniform, and she provided Simi with a clean exercise book each year. In all her eight years of school, Simi never missed a day. She walked in rain and dust, and through the torrent of taunts and names the boys tossed her way as she went. In the early years, she walked with other girls, but one by one they all left. They were circumcised, married and sent to live in their husband’s villages. Every time another girl left, Simi fought dread that she would be next. But her mother kept sending her. Every evening when it grew dark and all the people withdrew to their houses, Simi and her brother showed their mother letters; they taught her how words were written. They taught her addition and subtraction and times tables. Those years, in Simi’s mind, were the happiest. But, in the way daylight follows a dark night, the dark follows daylight, too.

Simi couldn’t remember the details anymore. When her father entered, her brother was in the middle of speaking. What story was her brother telling? Simi only remembered that he stopped, mid-word, when their father burst into the hut. This is where her memory skipped from a feeling of contentment to one of fear.

“Where is the money?” Her father’s voice. Angry and urgent. “You have been stealing money.” His voice stank of honey beer.

Simi’s mother was a good wife. Simi knew that. She’d never seen her mother disagree with her father. But now, Simi’s mother turned to him and said quietly, “I have not taken your money. I have given you many sheep and goats.”

Simi remembered sliding closer to her mother. She remembered the warmth from her mother’s skin, and how suddenly it disappeared when her father leaned down and pulled her mother up.

“You are a liar, wife!”

Simi watched as her father dragged her mother from the hut. She couldn’t move. Her brother jumped up and disappeared through the door. There was scuffling outside. Simi heard her mother make a guttural sound and then she heard a thud. Suddenly her father was back, standing above Simi. His red eyes, foul breath and the angry quivering of his lips made him look inhuman, like a monster or a wild beast.

He leaned down slowly and, when his face was only inches from Simi’s, he growled.

“You, child, find me my money.”

Later Simi would cry and wonder why she did what she did. But at that moment, her monster father took all the thoughts from her head. It was just an empty cave.

“It is there,” she whispered, pointing under the cowhide bed.

Her father pivoted, still leaning low, and stretched a long arm out into the space under the bed. His face instantly changed when his fingers felt the tin box. He smiled wide, stood up, tucked the box under his arm and was gone.

Simi crept out of the hut. She thought her mother might be there, but she wasn’t. It was dark and she could hardly see the sleeping cattle. Not even the stars were shining. Simi kept the fire alive, and knowing her mother would want something warm to drink when she returned, she put a pot of water on the fire for tea. She added the sugar and milk and took it off the heat when it boiled. The tea grew cool, and the milk formed a skin on top, and still her mother didn’t return. Finally, unable to keep her eyes open, Simi curled up on the bed and fell asleep. She woke again when her mother returned and climbed into the bed next to her. Simi listened to her mother breathing for a long time. She was ashamed of what she’d done.

The next morning, Simi woke up early. Her mother was stirring chai in the pot and ladled out a hot cup that she handed to Simi. Her face was calm.

Simi watched her mother’s face carefully, desperate to know if she was angry with Simi or if, Simi hoped, she understood the choice Simi made. She found it impossible to refuse her father. Surely her mother understood.

“It was your school money, Simi.”

Shame bubbled up in Simi’s mouth. It was impossible to drink her tea.

“I wanted you to learn so when you married, you could be smarter than your husband. A husband can beat his wife, he can take what she has, but he can never take the things she knows.”

Simi stood up. It was almost time to leave for school. She glanced at the hook where her uniform hung. It was empty.

“Your father wanted that, too. I gave it to him.”

The loss was a blow to her chest. Simi fought to find air to breathe.

Her mother continued, “He has also told the laiboni that you are to be cut.”

How fast everything changed then. Simi was fifteen. Many of her age-mates were already women—circumcised and married and gone from her manyatta. The last several years were dry; Simi’s father’s herds had thinned, and the land grew hard. The bushes and trees the women cut for firewood and building were less and less plentiful. They had to walk farther to get them and, without tree and grass roots to hold the soil together, when it did rain, it merely turned the land to mud. All the seeds and tiny grasses were gone. Money was harder to find and, therefore, food less plenty. Simi would bring a bride price of at least two cows and two goats and one less mouth to feed.

Her mother changed. In the evenings, she didn’t ask Simi’s brother about what he was learning in school. Simi didn’t ask him, either. She tasted bitterness every time she thought of him writing in his exercise book and learning things while she cut wood and washed clothes in the trickle of water that used to be a river. Instead, each night they sat quietly, staring into the fire and sipping tea.

The night before Simi’s emurata, though, her mother took her hand and said, “I was a weak wife.” Then she reached up and unlatched her favorite necklace from her own neck. It was a stunning piece, wide and flat and shimmering with beads in all shades of blue and green. Simi remembered watching her mother make it, painstakingly selecting the perfect bead to sew on next. It was the only piece she’d refused to sell. Simi felt her mother’s rough hands slide the necklace around Simi’s neck and fix the clasp shut.

“You are my daughter,” her mother told her. “And now you are a woman and soon a wife. Your life will be like mine, but maybe not your children’s. Maybe they will have a wider sky.”

Simi looked at her feet. She knew her mother was still bitterly disappointed in her, in the way she’d ruined the dream her mother had had—to send Simi to school and delay marriage. This was a gesture that her mother had forgiven her, maybe, but had not forgotten.

Simi was resigned to marriage. Even with her schooling, it was inconceivable that she wouldn’t follow the path of all the other women before her. She was lucky that the man who chose her was the son of the village elder, the one whose opinion mattered and to whom others paid respect. Her husband was a pleasant man and had an easy rapport with all his wives and his children. Simi was the third wife.

Simi was married for one year before her husband began asking if she was unlucky. He asked with pity in his eyes—a childless woman is a sign of chaos; disorder in the way the world always works. After all, of what importance is a woman without a child? A woman is to provide children; if she cannot give babies, what can she give?

There were things to be done in this situation. The week-long silent praying to N’gai, the eating of lambs, the visit to the oreteti tree in the forest, the slaughtering of the ox, the dousing with milk and the eating of fat. For two years Simi consulted with the village doctor. Four times, she hoped. And four times the babies, unformed, left her. The other women, especially the other wives, looked at her through eyes tinged with suspicion. An unlucky woman could veil the whole village with her curse. And what was unluckier than a woman who couldn’t bear children? God only made perfect things; imperfections were doled out in life only to the people who deserved them. A childless wife was an imperfection of the highest degree—a stunning slight from God. Some husbands cast out their infertile wives to save themselves from the stain of bad luck she might bring to the family. Some villages refused to allow unlucky women to stay.

Simi’s husband didn’t tell her the American was coming. She found out through his first wife, Isina, when the women all gathered at the river to wash their clothes.

“Why is the muzungu coming here?” someone asked. “To steal our men?” The women laughed.

“How will she live here when she cannot speak to us?” someone else asked.

Nalami, Isina’s daughter, turned to Simi. Her hands were soapy with lye, and her palms red and chapped. She paused and then said slowly, “Simi, you will be the only one who will be able to talk to her.” The other women nodded and murmured.

“Ooh, Simi.” Loiyan cackled. She was the second wife, and although she often kept the women laughing with her jokes and her brassy interactions with the men, she had a meanness that could flare up with little warning. In the beginning, Simi was frightened of Loiyan, but she wasn’t anymore. Still, she didn’t like Loiyan—she thought of her as she did a snake, more dangerous because the strike was often unexpected.

“Ooh, Simi.” Loiyan stood tall and tipped her head back. “You will be too important. You will be an American yourself.” Loiyan pranced in place, pretending to be a white woman.

“You don’t look like an American,” Simi said, “you look like a sick hippo.” All the women laughed, and Loiyan sucked her teeth and hunkered down again to rinse her pile of clothes in the slow-moving river.

Simi was excited by the news of the muzungu. When her husband came to her the next night, Simi handed him a cup of chai and asked him why the American was coming.

“She wants to study us, the way we do things.”

Simi was surprised. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would be curious about the lives they led in the manyatta. She couldn’t imagine why an American would come all the way here just to watch them.

She had seen white people before, but never up close. Usually she saw them behind the glass of a vehicle window, through a film of dust billowing from under the slow-rolling tires as she stood by the side of the road. Often, the white faces on the other side of the glass stared at her, too, with eyes as wide and curious as hers. Sometimes, if the windows were open, the white people would lift their hands and call “Hello!” It always thrilled Simi when this happened. English was her best subject at school, and hearing words she’d practiced over and over again coming from the mouths of strangers was exciting. She loved the way learning a different language had made her feel free—like she had a key to a new life. When she waved and called “Hello” into the van’s dusty wake, she felt important. English was her connection to the world outside, and now, though her school days were long past, she was proud of her knowledge. Her mother was right; nobody could take away the things she knew.

In the early days, the American hardly spoke. She wandered like a ghost through the dust in the manyatta and started at the movements of the cattle. Simi watched her closely. She felt too shy to talk to the white woman at first, but she also worried that if the American stayed frightened and out of place, she would leave. Simi desperately wanted her to stay. She watched how the other Maasai women crowded into the American’s little house—one they’d constructed for her the day she arrived—and just sat there, watching the strange woman and gossiping among themselves. Finally Simi slipped in with them one afternoon and watched the white woman trying to light a fire in her fire pit. There were no embers there, and Simi quickly got up and fetched a bright coal from her own house and brought it back. She sifted it into the American’s fire pit, added a few twigs and dry grasses and blew it all into a flame.

“You must keep some fire alive all the time,” she said quietly. “We let it burn, just a little, even at night. We must always have our own fire, miss.”

The white woman smiled. “You speak English! Thank God! I’ve been needing you!” Simi felt herself flush, and she knew the other women were watching. She thought she heard Loiyan sucking her teeth.

“Please,” the American said, “tell me your name. Mine is Leona.”

From that moment, Leona was always near Simi. “Help me, Simi,” Leona would say, and the questions that followed were endless and wide-ranging—from how many handfuls of tea to toss into boiling water for chai, to how a man selects a wife. Simi grew bolder in her English, and lost her shyness with Leona. She scolded Leona the time Leona forgot to dip her head when greeting an elder, and warned her never to walk far from the manyatta in the evenings, when the shadows grew long and the hyenas and leopards stirred from their dens. With Leona next to her at the river, washing their clothes together, Simi found Loiyan left her alone. It wasn’t enjoyable to tease Simi anymore when Simi had a friend to speak to in a language Loiyan couldn’t understand.

Simi came to understand that Leona’s life back in America was completely different from the life they all lived here. Leona showed them photos of enormously tall buildings, expanses of grass so green it almost hurt their eyes to see it.

“Where are the cattle?” Simi asked when she saw the grass. “They must be too fat to walk!”

The images were breathtaking—it was hard to imagine they were real. Leona explained to Simi that not only did America look vastly different from Loita, but that life there—everything from clothing to speech to thoughts themselves—were unlike those here. Simi knew that some of the other women, ones who had never gone to school and seen a photo in a book, didn’t understand how to grasp the images and ideas Leona introduced them to; their minds were so firmly here that they could not see things differently. Simi could, though. She’d read stories about people different from herself and knew that the Maasai way wasn’t the only way people lived. The images in the pictures and the stories Leona told were like dreams. They flickered in her mind and flashed against the reality she saw around her constantly, two worlds—one inside herself, and one outside, like hot flames that burned blue and orange and red all at the same time.

In the evenings, Leona would come to Simi’s house. Her Maa was improving. Often, they practiced together. Leona would look through her notebooks and ask Simi questions about things she’d seen that day, and note ages and names of the people in the village. In return, Leona would teach Simi American slang. Simi loved the feel in her mouth that the new words gave her, and took to peppering her Maa with “That’s cool!” and “For real?” Other nights they’d drink tea and just stare into the fire quietly. One night, after Leona had been in the manyatta for several weeks, she sat on a low stool next to Simi. Simi threaded beads onto a strip of leather for a bracelet. It was dark outside, and chilly. “You don’t have children,” Leona stated.

Simi was relaxed in Leona’s presence but this statement—vocalized so clearly and directly—shocked her. It was unexpected, too bold for Simi’s comfort. She started and spilled some tea in her lap. It was hot and it stung. Her eyes welled, and she glanced across the bright embers of the fire and saw Leona watching her. There was no malice in Leona’s face. Part of Simi wanted to bury the subject forever, but another part was desperate to talk about the pain, release it to someone else in a way she couldn’t with the other women. Leona’s face was clear, her eyes blank.

“How long have you been married?” Simi heard Leona’s question and shifted uncomfortably.

“Three years,” Simi answered.

“It’s a problem to be a wife without a child?” Leona was speaking as if she had her notebook and pen with her, but Simi saw she had neither.

Simi answered in English. To say the words in her language made them hurt more coming out. “We say that a woman who hasn’t given birth is like a wilderness. A woman or a man with children to remember them can never die. But a person like me? When I am gone, nobody will remember.”

“In America people can choose to have a baby or not,” Leona said. “But even so, there are people who want to but can’t. This is something that happens everywhere, Simi. Have you seen a doctor?”

Simi didn’t answer. She was tingling with discomfort now. There was no way to explain it all to Leona. Her pain was not something for an American notebook, something to be inscribed with a pen on paper. Simi’s bitter frustration about not having a child, and her fear of the repercussions, were not something she would ever let see the light of day. She tried to keep herself from even thinking of them. How could sharing the story in words even scratch the surface of Simi’s disappointment and terror at the way her own body betrayed her? She was grateful when, after a long silence, Leona smiled and said she was tired, and then stood up to leave.

* * *

With Leona in the manyatta, Simi’s daily life changed. Her ability to communicate was a link between the American and the others. She had a certain power she’d never felt before. Even the men saw it. They approached Simi carefully with their questions about Leona, and the conversations Leona had with the villagers all happened with Simi hunkered close by, interpreting for both parties, not just the words themselves, but the ideas and feelings behind them. For the first time since Simi understood the fact of her infertility, she felt her fear loosen. Leona was her anchor. Even with her bad luck, they couldn’t send her away while they needed her so much. They were grateful for Simi’s education now. There were educated men in the village who spoke English, but because Simi was a woman, she had easier access to Leona. A man couldn’t spend so much time with a woman who wasn’t his wife without eyebrows being raised.

Leona joined the women daily at the river, and the women taught her to bang her clothes against the rocks and rub the bar of White Star soap until it frothed. It made the hours of banging and rubbing and rinsing clothes go faster when Leona was there. Simi was sorry, in some deep way, that she wasn’t the only woman who could have a companionship with Leona. Leona was beginning to make friends with many of the other women, but she was grateful that Leona seemed happy here, content. She wanted Leona to stay for a long time.

“Simi,” Leona whispered one day when they were resting their soapy hands. “I think Loiyan is pregnant.”

It was something Simi knew already, but she glanced up at Loiyan, anyway. The folds of the other woman’s wraps strained a bit under the swell of her belly. Simi swallowed a hot ember of jealousy. Loiyan already had three children. Two of them boys.

“Isn’t it true that a childless wife can adopt a baby of another woman?” Leona was whispering her words, but also speaking in English, not Maa. The conversation, Simi understood, was one Leona wanted to keep secret.

“Yes,” Simi answered simply. The possibility had crossed her mind a thousand times. To be regarded a mother didn’t absolutely have to mean bearing your own child. “It happens often.” Leona opened her mouth to speak again, but Simi already understood the subtext of Leona’s question, and answered it before Leona could clarify.

“Unless the reason for the adoption is that the mother died, the women have to be as close as sisters.”

Later the thoughts of adoption—and the seeming impossibility of it—crowded Simi’s mind like the scuffling cattle in the paddock—pushing against each other and refusing to let her sleep. Her husband was rich with children. Loiyan’s three and seven from his first wife, Isina. Now another baby was coming, and still, she herself had nothing.

A few months after Leona arrived, Simi found her squatting next to the laiboni, struggling to make conversation. Simi offered to translate, and when she heard the questions Leona asked, she felt herself shaking. Her skin went cold, and her vision blurred. She recognized a feeling of deeply embedded anger, but there was something else, as well—a sense of betrayal. N’gai had betrayed her, and now Leona had, too, by so easily achieving, and not even wanting, the one thing Simi desperately desired.

That evening Simi left the enclosure. She walked until she couldn’t see the acacia tree fencing, and she couldn’t hear the sounds of people. It was near dusk, and this was dangerous. Simi didn’t want to be seen, though. She needed time alone, and she didn’t want to talk. She stood at a place where the land dipped down toward a stream, now dry, but where shrubs and grasses were thicker. She saw a family of zebra, munching calmly, and she felt safer—they didn’t sense a predator nearby. Near where she stood, she saw a young green shrub, the one they used to treat stomachaches. They always needed this plant, so she began plucking leaves, tying them up in the end of her kanga as she did. It was later, when she returned home to heat up tea, that she had her idea. Leona hadn’t learned to tell one plant from another, so Simi tossed a handful in a crumpled plastic bag and made her way to Leona’s house. These leaves would do nothing, Simi knew. And as she handed them to Leona, she imagined the baby clinging tightly to the dark insides of Leona’s body. Simi’s own muscles clenched at the idea of that fullness. If only. If only.

It was early one morning—before dawn, even the cattle and goats were still asleep—when Leona’s cry broke the dark sky into two. Simi heard it. It woke her from her dream and sent a rushing shiver down her spine. It was time. She wrapped her kanga around her shoulders to stave off the cool air and crossed the enclosure to Leona’s house. The midwife was already there, and some other women, too. Everyone loved to participate in a birth. There was Loiyan with her own new infant—another boy—snuggled fast asleep in a wrap tied tightly against his mother’s back.

Leona was lucky. The birth was an easy one, and the midwife had no trouble releasing the baby from Leona’s body and into the world. The cord was cut and the new baby—a tiny, pale girl—was placed in Leona’s arms.

* * *

There were women who didn’t take to their babies. Simi had seen it happen before, but never with someone who didn’t also have the wild-eyed look of the cursed. Leona’s reaction frightened Simi. After the baby was placed in Leona’s arms, Leona made a wailing like an animal. Her mouth opened, and her eyes closed, and the cry was from a deep place Simi never suspected Leona had inside of her.

Leona tried to nurse the infant, but within days she pushed the baby away and wrapped a kanga tightly around her breasts to stop the milk from coming. It wasn’t uncommon for mothers to be unable to nurse—it happened on occasion, and another nursing mother could always step in and help. But Leona could nurse. The few times she tried, her milk came strong and plentiful. Simi could see that the baby was able to drink her fill and that Leona’s breasts were swollen and ripe. Simi never heard of a woman who could nurse but wouldn’t. There was a sharp feeling in Simi’s belly when she saw the way Leona treated the baby.

Simi told herself she was helping Leona when she began caring for the baby herself, and when she arranged for a wet nurse. The wet nurse had five other children, one only a few days older than Nalangu, so she didn’t mind when Simi handed her the pink baby for feedings. A few weeks later, when Leona’s interest in her baby hadn’t increased, Simi asked her husband for a ram to make the adoption official. His wife’s adopting Leona’s baby was a good thing, and although he found Nalangu’s color unappealing, he was happy to provide the animal. All his wives should have children, and this would bring luck to Simi and the community. Even if the child was the color of a bald baby aardvark. Simi divided the ram’s fat into two portions. Leona was still gray and quiet, and Simi told Leona the fat would make her body strong again after the depletion of pregnancy. After all, that was the truth. Leona never asked why Simi bundled off the other portion of fat. Simi told herself that Leona must know the procedure for adopting. She’d been here for so long now, taking notes on everything. Surely they’d talked about this.

Simi loved being a mother. Her place in the village was cemented. Loiyan didn’t tease her anymore, and her husband no longer looked worried when he came to her at night. Simi was part of things now—safely protected from the wilderness of a life without a child.

Simi didn’t choose Nalangu’s name, but it sounded like the hand of fate reaching out to give Simi what she’d wanted for so long. Until now, she’d felt like a member of a different tribe herself. Now she and this new person were together, they had each other and that would allow them both to be included. Simi knew Leona watched Simi and the baby together with a sense of relief. Leona’s skin grew pink again, and the hollowness in her eyes filled out. She seemed happy. By the time Nalangu turned one, and it was time to give her a proper name, Simi didn’t ask Leona what she thought. The mother could decide this one, and Simi chose Adia, “gift,” because that was what this child was.

* * *

Later, Simi wondered why the clouds came that particular day, and what it was she’d done to deserve renewed punishment. She was a good person, a good mother to Adia. She took all the necessary steps to ensure that N’gai—God—was satisfied with her. Leona had been going to other manyattas often lately. She also traveled to Nairobi. Simi could sense that her friend’s attachment to the village was waning. Simi was ashamed that the notion of Leona leaving brought her relief. There were times she wondered if her baby would feel more like hers if Leona were gone. The link they had—Leona and Adia—simply through the color of their skin, was too obvious. People outside the village, people who didn’t know, assumed the wrong connection. When Leona was gone, it would be easier.

It was a day like any other, hot and clear and dusty. They needed rain, but they always needed rain. It was a special day, too. The emurata was a glad day for the village, and the moran were gathering. There was no way Simi could have known that Leona’s mothering urge, so long dead, would choose this day to rear its head and strike.

It was past noon, and the sun was flat and hot and stared down at the village with its burning face when suddenly Simi heard Adia’s scream. She recognized her girl’s voice like her own and, with her heart pounding in her chest, she leaped up from where she’d been sitting with some other women and raced across the village. She expected to see a snake or a leopard or some terrible creature hurting her daughter. Instead, she saw Leona dragging her baby—her baby—from the emurata hut. Leona’s face, usually blank, was a riot of clouds like the darkest of rainy seasons. Her eyes were glassy—those of a cursed woman—and they lit upon Adia like flames. Leona’s English was fast and rough and too angry for Simi to grasp completely, but her intention was clear. She was taking Adia away.

Instinctively, like any mother would, Simi reached out to pull her daughter back from the abyss. Adia shouted her name, “Yeyo! Mother!” She clutched at Simi’s hand.

Adia screamed, “Tung’wayeni!” at Leona, “Don’t touch me!”

And the girl tried to wrest her arm from Leona’s grip. Simi saw the terror in her daughter’s eyes and tried to make Leona look at her—she tried to get the American to calm down, to speak in a way Simi could understand.

But when she did, her words echoed Simi’s darkest fear. “Adia, you are my daughter!” Leona said in a cold and measured voice—finally speaking so that Simi could take it in.

“You are mine. You are mine.”

Adia stumbled, and Simi’s muscles fell slack with shock, and her grip released from Adia’s arm. Then the girl was gone. Simi fell to the ground. The other women gathered around her, but she couldn’t answer their questions.

Simi watched her daughter’s anguished face through a screen of dust and then through the smudged window of Leona’s car as it pulled away. As the car grew smaller and smaller, Simi gathered her energy and drew herself up from the ground. She chased after the car, kicking up dust and cutting her feet on the sharp stones. She followed Leona’s car until she couldn’t anymore, and then she fell to earth like a rock. She looked up once to see the tiny car far in the distance, and then, like all the white people she’d seen before, they disappeared.

When the dust died away and the earth beneath her grew cold, Simi lifted her head. The evening was coming, and she could hear the sounds of the village far behind her. The emurata was finished, and the children were bringing the goats and cattle back from their grazing. Something—she couldn’t name the motivation, because every cell inside her wanted to die—forced her to stand and shuffle back through the enclosure and into her house. It was dangerous to be outside the manyatta at night. She could be attacked by a leopard, a lion, and eaten. It was the smallest part of her that pushed her to avoid that by retreating to her home. She bent to enter and fell into her bed. The fire needed tending, but she couldn’t make herself care. Simi’s longing for her daughter came in painful waves that made her feel as if her body was burning on the inside. How could this be real? She was desperate to relive that last moment when she held Adia’s arm and watched as the terrified girl was pulled from her grasp. How could she have let it happen? How could a mother let her child—her only child—be taken? God was right not to bless her body with her own children—she was not fit to be a mother.

Over the next few days, Simi was broken. She could only lie in her bed. The other women—even Loiyan—came into her hut to see how she was. They kept watch, boiled chai in the suferia, and tried, constantly, to make Simi open her mouth to drink, to swallow, to take the small sustenance that the sugar and tea and milk might give her. The women whispered to each other as they watched her. Simi didn’t speak. She couldn’t open her mouth, not to answer the women and not to drink the tea; she could hardly open her eyes.

She remembered the time after Adia’s birth, and how Leona had sunk into herself, barely speaking, barely eating. A thought crossed her mind that this was Adia’s mark—that her mothers were destined to share a kind of darkness. And then she remembered that Adia had been pulled away from her; she was nobody’s mother—not anymore. It was that thought that made her stomach heave, and she leaned over and retched. Because she hadn’t eaten for days, it was nothing but bitter, sticky foam she coughed out. She watched as it disappeared, slowly absorbed into the dirt of the floor. The women in her hut tsked and sucked their teeth.

Late that night, Simi woke up. Her hut was empty. The other women had gone home. That was a relief. Her stomach growled. Her mouth still didn’t want food, but her belly called for it. She stretched her weak legs and slid off the bed. Even though she’d barely sipped water in the last few days, she had a desperate need to urinate. The cattle in the manyatta enclosure lowed softly and shook their great heads as Simi slipped past them. There were fewer than there used to be, Simi noted. The drought was bad again. It seemed the pattern was changing—a year of good rains and hope, followed by several years of dry land and dry skies, starving animals and hungry people. It struck Simi just then that nothing was certain. Not ever. Not even the continuation of the life she’d always lived. More and more Maasai men were abandoning cattle herding and moving to Nairobi to seek work. There were manyattas where no men lived at all, only women and children, all the husbands and sons having left for new opportunities. Everything was changing.

Simi squatted down and felt the relief of emptying her bladder. It felt good to be outside, to breathe the cool night air and look up at the stars. It was a clear night, not one cloud to tease her with the possibility of rain, but none to obscure the universe above her, either. The moon was new. It was a curved edge, as sharp and clean as a scythe. The Maasai myth said that the sun and the moon were married. Olapa, the moon, was short-tempered and, during a fight one day, she wounded her husband. To cover his wound, he began shining more brightly than anything else. To punish his wife, he struck out one of her eyes. Now, Simi thought, as she slowly stood up, her body weak from lack of food, the sun was punishing all of them by shining too hard, never allowing rain clouds to form.

The moon, the wounded wife, was lucky, Simi thought. She’d only had an eye taken. Simi remembered her mother always said nobody could take an education from her. That was true, but her mother never told her that everything else could be taken; a body part, grazing grasses for the cattle, a way of life and a daughter.

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